CHAPTER XXIX
THE BODY OF THE DRAGON
If you remember, when Madeleine had realised that the feast of Saint Magdalene was approaching, an idea had flashed into her head which she had not then dared to entertain. But it had slowly crept back and now had established itself as a fixed purpose. It was this—on the feast of Saint Magdalene to communicate, without having first received Absolution. She felt that it would please the potent Saint that she should commit a deadly sin in her honour. Also, it would mean a complete and final rupture with Jansenism. And with one stroke she would annihilate her Salvation—that predestined ghostly certainty to the fulfilment of which the Celestial Powers seemed bent on sacrificing all her worldly hopes and happiness. Yes, she would now be able to walk in security along the familiar paths of life, unhaunted by the fear of the sudden whirr of wings and then—the rape to the love of invisible things.
So on Sunday, the twenty-second of July, she partook of the Blessed Sacrament. Arnauld had written in the ‘Fréquente Communion’: ‘therefore as the true penitent eats the body of Jesus Christ, so the sinner eats the body of the Dragon.’
Well, and so she was eating the body of the Dragon! The knowledge gave her a strange sense of exaltation and an awful peace.